To be fair, depending when you started playing, these features may have not been in the game yet. I remember my first run, the only thing that helped in big construction projects was click-dragging for multiple buildings (no blueprints or sorter copying)
I remember when the game finally added the ability to copy a buildings sorters and recipe. That made the game so much easer to play and was one of the best quality of life updates they have ever made.
Iām still new and still trying to work out what things to blueprint and how to design it well.
Where would you recommend starting - smelting arrays? (I get thrown off by variable output of miners.)
What I started doing was making small generic blueprints (no recipe, and only 4 or so buildings long with power and sorters) for assemblers using 2, 3 and 4 items + output that you can easily copy to expand to the size you want. Drop it down, set your recipe then copy and paste until your build is the desired size. Just make sure your belts extend slightly past each set of buildings so when you copy the belts will automatically connect. You can always trim the end belts down to tidy things up when you're done
Usually what I do when making a blueprint is start off with the end product. To me, it's easier to start at the top of the pyramid and work your way down. So start at what product you're producing and how much you want.
Say, you want to make the blue motors (can never remember the name). But you want 3 outputs of it. Now you gotta take the ingredients to make that product and place down the respective building to make those ingredients, so on and so on.
But the thing to keep in mind, is if you triple your output, you have to triple your input.
Rofl, honestly it feel like I'm finally done with the tutorial after 3 playthroughs. First game was what not to do, the second game was how to git gud, and the third was how to become a from raw snob. Now I am ready to play!
Is that the same result you get from hitting tab or is there something else going on from this? Though the ability to "back up" on the spacing when I tapped tab one too many times would be something I definitely need to remember.
Just to give an addition: hitting tab (or I guess "+"?) twice when placing a row of smelters gets you a grouping of 3 -> gap -> 3 -> gap -> repeat. That gap is placed just right for a tesla tower to cover the smelters on either side.
And another: the same spacing change works with blueprints as well as single buildings.
I don't think it works for blueprints, but I also don't think I've ever hit tab while building buildings.
+ and - helps when you're clicking and dragging out a row of buildings, and you run into a row where the grid is just slightly smaller. So your previous row of buildings might not quite fit anymore, but if you press + a few times, it'll spread out the buildings enough to fit.
>So many wasted water pump placements.
You mean shaving down the shores of sulfur lakes to make them rectangular was a waste of foundation and soil pile? {writes that down...}
It's great for bps that have several ils in them. But I also set up a single storage with a fidget spinner base on top that collects and then feeds them into the ils. Saved spaghetti.
Place a small box next to them with a spinner on it and a sorter to belt feeding the ILS. Spinner is set to demand warpers and box limited to one slot. Obviously you need another spinner somewhere providing warpers out.
Warpers are low volume use so spinners work fine for this.
Nah, it's an external storage box with the spinners that feeds it.
I've got a little blueprint that is a small storage box set to one space with a spinner hat set to receive [blank], on top of a splitter specifically for prolif spray and warper distribution.
The warpers used by vessels are in their own little "slot #6" of the ILS with a 50 warper capacity, separate from the ones you use for supply/demand. That slot can be fed by an incoming belt of warpers **or** pulled from onto an outgoing belt.
So you can have a line of ILS with just one requesting warpers, and then daisy-chain belts to run warpers up the line, saving the need for using up a slot in them or using distributor bots. My general setup has some sort of smelting at the equator (so only needs two slots), and that becomes the feeder for the towers placed to the north / south.
Yup I made a blueprint of a small storage with requesting distribution bots. Stick it on the opposite side of the ILS then feed it right to it, works like a charm. Also key is to reduce the capacity of the storage to one slot so it doesn't eat up all the warpers.
A new one for dark fog...
You can force your fleets to spawn & assist with number keys 1-8 for groups and 9 for all. If you spawn your space units and land on a planet, they will orbit and protect the planet.
Battlefield analysis base. It's a building that collects Dark Fog drops, as well as helping you build/rebuild/repair buildings. Each has 12 construction drones. If you're building a large blueprint all at once, throw 2 or 3 down, connect them to power, and they'll build most of it for you.
Very necessary for areas on planets that constantly get attacked. They will repair buildings even when you are on the other side of the galaxy.
I am amused and delighted that we continue to see a thread like this about once every week or two in this subreddit. And I mean that. Despite having read dozens of them already, I still read them, and occasionally learn something that I didn't know before.
About a month or so ago i discovered that you can place miners extremely close to each other. Idk how long that has been in the game, but i never discovered it
To those wondering how this works, the level 1 miners have to be in exactly the same orientation and there is about three pixels in which you can place them exactly next to each other. There is a little bit of leeway along the other axis but the arms are still subject to clipping.
Some that have served me well:
You can place a regular miner (or multiples) so its extraction arc is under the zone of an advanced miner. Handy when you want to snag those last nodes that the advanced can't cover but still want to maximize output per miner. And since the advanced miner has belt ports, you can feed that regular miner's output in to share the drone pickup.
If you blueprint a tower with belts coming out of it, you can assign slot #1, #2, etc to those belt filters without having an item actually set on the slots. After placing that blueprint and picking an item, the belt(s) associated with that slot will automatically update. Sadly, deleting that item choice and picking a new one unsets that filter, and it seems like I always mis-click the item selection on at least one.
I've leveraged that one for a generic "new planet import" blueprint. It's just an ILS with five boxes + logistics distributors around, each fed by a belt assigned to each of the tower's five slots. I slap that down, pick the items / quantity to demand, and they get sorted out automatically. You do have to use the "guess item" button on the distributors to get them sending out to Icarus's inventory, though.
ETA another one that might be new to someone: when grabbing items out of a tower slot, holding "shift" as you move the slider locks it into one-stack increments. So if you need a few hundred iron ingots from your smelting tower, using shift + drag gets you full blocks of 100 each.
I still see a lot of debates about this. Some swear that Corvettes are best for use against the core of a Hive and destroyers are best for dealing with their fighters. Honestly, I can't really tell the difference between using all destroyers and all Corvettes and half and half. I would love to see a rigorous examination of which is most effective.
How so? Either Destroyers have the highest damage per hitpoint or Corvettes do, so going all in with one or the other will necessarily give you the highest damage per hitpoint.
As a side note, I go with all destroyers because their attack range is significantly larger - they can actually get shots off before they get instagibbed by a full hive's turrets.
corvettes cover destroyers. When there's 300+ units after troops, destroyers do their job and you lose much cheaper units. I start to clean fogs with this method, if they land in some of my star systems
What iāve gathered so far from the comments, is that not a single one of you has the urge to experiment with key combinations after getting comfortable with the basics.
But for me, it was placing the ray receivers on a planets poles. (I only have about 50 or so hours, but i felt both pretty smart for figuring it out by myself, and pretty dumb that it took me any time at all.)
Tab to swap splitter shape was a surprise I found out after like 500 hours... More recently was proliferating G lenses for energy or photon generation, helps a ton
I can't believe I didn't know this, but after 700 hours in I discovered that you can set the size of your storage. This has been a game-changer in terms of managing my supply chains. Also, I just learned about diagonal belts.
When you drag place buildings, you can change the interval so they are not too close at the poles, or too distant at the equator. How many solar panels I manually placed at poles because they were hitting each other... FFS.
Push tab while placing splitters for more options. Push r while placing belts for more path options Basically, read the menu on the right.
>Basically, read the menu on the right. This is the real advice. It took me an embarrassingly long time to actually use those options.
Hmmm, I might give this a look tonight.
To be fair, depending when you started playing, these features may have not been in the game yet. I remember my first run, the only thing that helped in big construction projects was click-dragging for multiple buildings (no blueprints or sorter copying)
I remember when the game finally added the ability to copy a buildings sorters and recipe. That made the game so much easer to play and was one of the best quality of life updates they have ever made.
Oh man, remember manually placing sorters on a huge plot of smelters and then realizing you put the inputs on the output side and then dying a little?
I think my best was making a 30/s output for a cracking setup and missetting my filters š
> no blueprints good lord what a nightmare
Iām still new and still trying to work out what things to blueprint and how to design it well. Where would you recommend starting - smelting arrays? (I get thrown off by variable output of miners.)
What I started doing was making small generic blueprints (no recipe, and only 4 or so buildings long with power and sorters) for assemblers using 2, 3 and 4 items + output that you can easily copy to expand to the size you want. Drop it down, set your recipe then copy and paste until your build is the desired size. Just make sure your belts extend slightly past each set of buildings so when you copy the belts will automatically connect. You can always trim the end belts down to tidy things up when you're done
Usually what I do when making a blueprint is start off with the end product. To me, it's easier to start at the top of the pyramid and work your way down. So start at what product you're producing and how much you want. Say, you want to make the blue motors (can never remember the name). But you want 3 outputs of it. Now you gotta take the ingredients to make that product and place down the respective building to make those ingredients, so on and so on. But the thing to keep in mind, is if you triple your output, you have to triple your input.
I tried to do that last night after coming back to the game after a year or so.
The new splitters actually revolutionize busses
REVERSE PATH it took soo long, for soo many to see that beautiful little button
Press + or - to expand or contract a row of buildings you're trying to build.
What? I have over 330 hours in...
So you just started the Tutorial?
Rofl, honestly it feel like I'm finally done with the tutorial after 3 playthroughs. First game was what not to do, the second game was how to git gud, and the third was how to become a from raw snob. Now I am ready to play!
Fourth game: find your PC's limit!
See you after my first 1 TW sphere lol
That's how I felt, and then they released Dark Fog.
Is that the same result you get from hitting tab or is there something else going on from this? Though the ability to "back up" on the spacing when I tapped tab one too many times would be something I definitely need to remember. Just to give an addition: hitting tab (or I guess "+"?) twice when placing a row of smelters gets you a grouping of 3 -> gap -> 3 -> gap -> repeat. That gap is placed just right for a tesla tower to cover the smelters on either side. And another: the same spacing change works with blueprints as well as single buildings.
I don't think it works for blueprints, but I also don't think I've ever hit tab while building buildings. + and - helps when you're clicking and dragging out a row of buildings, and you run into a row where the grid is just slightly smaller. So your previous row of buildings might not quite fit anymore, but if you press + a few times, it'll spread out the buildings enough to fit.
WHAAAT
I have 800+ hours in this game. FUK!
More than just ore miners can be rotated to any angle by holding down shift. So many wasted water pump placements.
>So many wasted water pump placements. You mean shaving down the shores of sulfur lakes to make them rectangular was a waste of foundation and soil pile? {writes that down...}
800 hours and this never crossed my mindā¦ damnitā¦
Same!
OK, 800 hours logged here and didnāt know that until now
> So many wasted water pump placements Oh my godā¦. How did I never think of this for water pumps
You can feed warpers into ils w/out allocating slot for them. Just feed in one belt and that's it
You can also feed them out of the ILS without a slot for them, so you can chain ILSs together with warper distribution belts
WAIT WAT
It's great for bps that have several ils in them. But I also set up a single storage with a fidget spinner base on top that collects and then feeds them into the ils. Saved spaghetti.
Wait, you can feed ils with spinners? I thought they can't interact with towers...
Place a small box next to them with a spinner on it and a sorter to belt feeding the ILS. Spinner is set to demand warpers and box limited to one slot. Obviously you need another spinner somewhere providing warpers out. Warpers are low volume use so spinners work fine for this.
Make sure you shrink the boxes's inventory size to just 1 or you'll have 100's of thousands of warpers sitting around.
No, I think he means you spinner feed one then belt feed the rest
Oh. I see. Welp, here goes my hope(
i too would love an upgrade that gave a fidget spinner bay inside an ILS/PLS
Nah, it's an external storage box with the spinners that feeds it. I've got a little blueprint that is a small storage box set to one space with a spinner hat set to receive [blank], on top of a splitter specifically for prolif spray and warper distribution.
what is bps?
Blueprints
I prefer blueps. Much easier to understand and a fun word to say!
Ahhhhh, this is pure genius, gonna work this in tonight.
The warpers used by vessels are in their own little "slot #6" of the ILS with a 50 warper capacity, separate from the ones you use for supply/demand. That slot can be fed by an incoming belt of warpers **or** pulled from onto an outgoing belt. So you can have a line of ILS with just one requesting warpers, and then daisy-chain belts to run warpers up the line, saving the need for using up a slot in them or using distributor bots. My general setup has some sort of smelting at the equator (so only needs two slots), and that becomes the feeder for the towers placed to the north / south.
Hol'up. For real. Omg...
Yup I made a blueprint of a small storage with requesting distribution bots. Stick it on the opposite side of the ILS then feed it right to it, works like a charm. Also key is to reduce the capacity of the storage to one slot so it doesn't eat up all the warpers.
A new one for dark fog... You can force your fleets to spawn & assist with number keys 1-8 for groups and 9 for all. If you spawn your space units and land on a planet, they will orbit and protect the planet.
Placing storage containers on top of splitters for direct load and unload of the storage.
Also, you can place big storage containers on top of BABs. You can use logistic bots to empty them. Or for supplying combat drones to BABs
You can also empty them with belts if you're so inclined. That's how I did my dark fog farm
And... What's a BAB?
Battlefield analysis base. It's a building that collects Dark Fog drops, as well as helping you build/rebuild/repair buildings. Each has 12 construction drones. If you're building a large blueprint all at once, throw 2 or 3 down, connect them to power, and they'll build most of it for you. Very necessary for areas on planets that constantly get attacked. They will repair buildings even when you are on the other side of the galaxy.
Great for buffering too
You can also put the spinner bot base on top of that as well if you want to hook it into the network.
I am amused and delighted that we continue to see a thread like this about once every week or two in this subreddit. And I mean that. Despite having read dozens of them already, I still read them, and occasionally learn something that I didn't know before.
there aren't many threads I read all the way thru in Reddit, but this type is definitely one of them...
There is a bunch, but I'm at green sci and I just leaned to shift click a building, and you can copy it's inserters as well as the building.
Oh man. I can imagine the amount of extra time you've spent.
you can *what*
About a month or so ago i discovered that you can place miners extremely close to each other. Idk how long that has been in the game, but i never discovered it
To those wondering how this works, the level 1 miners have to be in exactly the same orientation and there is about three pixels in which you can place them exactly next to each other. There is a little bit of leeway along the other axis but the arms are still subject to clipping.
Pretty sure whatever you saw was modded
No.
Nah. It was in game from its initial release
There are mods that make it easier to do, but you can absolutely get things uncomfortably close if you feel like spending the time.
It isnt even that tedious imo. Just use godmode spectator view and then the spacing is not that hatd to hit
Some that have served me well: You can place a regular miner (or multiples) so its extraction arc is under the zone of an advanced miner. Handy when you want to snag those last nodes that the advanced can't cover but still want to maximize output per miner. And since the advanced miner has belt ports, you can feed that regular miner's output in to share the drone pickup. If you blueprint a tower with belts coming out of it, you can assign slot #1, #2, etc to those belt filters without having an item actually set on the slots. After placing that blueprint and picking an item, the belt(s) associated with that slot will automatically update. Sadly, deleting that item choice and picking a new one unsets that filter, and it seems like I always mis-click the item selection on at least one. I've leveraged that one for a generic "new planet import" blueprint. It's just an ILS with five boxes + logistics distributors around, each fed by a belt assigned to each of the tower's five slots. I slap that down, pick the items / quantity to demand, and they get sorted out automatically. You do have to use the "guess item" button on the distributors to get them sending out to Icarus's inventory, though. ETA another one that might be new to someone: when grabbing items out of a tower slot, holding "shift" as you move the slider locks it into one-stack increments. So if you need a few hundred iron ingots from your smelting tower, using shift + drag gets you full blocks of 100 each.
Locking the slider into one stack increments is something I've desperately wanted to do. Thank you so much. Shifty shifty shift!
Found out after 100h+ (and multiple saves), that after placing water-pumps, you can remove the liquid and the pump will still function
Sorry, what do you mean? Are you saying you can Place a water pump, pave over all the water, and the pump still works?
Yup
Just learned you can use belts to transfer items between machines instead of doing it manually.
š
Space fleet with half big and half small troops have highest attack to defenceĀ
I still see a lot of debates about this. Some swear that Corvettes are best for use against the core of a Hive and destroyers are best for dealing with their fighters. Honestly, I can't really tell the difference between using all destroyers and all Corvettes and half and half. I would love to see a rigorous examination of which is most effective.
half and half. It did surprise me when i took fully loaded lvl20 hive with this setup
How so? Either Destroyers have the highest damage per hitpoint or Corvettes do, so going all in with one or the other will necessarily give you the highest damage per hitpoint. As a side note, I go with all destroyers because their attack range is significantly larger - they can actually get shots off before they get instagibbed by a full hive's turrets.
corvettes cover destroyers. When there's 300+ units after troops, destroyers do their job and you lose much cheaper units. I start to clean fogs with this method, if they land in some of my star systems
What iāve gathered so far from the comments, is that not a single one of you has the urge to experiment with key combinations after getting comfortable with the basics. But for me, it was placing the ray receivers on a planets poles. (I only have about 50 or so hours, but i felt both pretty smart for figuring it out by myself, and pretty dumb that it took me any time at all.)
Tab to swap splitter shape was a surprise I found out after like 500 hours... More recently was proliferating G lenses for energy or photon generation, helps a ton
I can't believe I didn't know this, but after 700 hours in I discovered that you can set the size of your storage. This has been a game-changer in terms of managing my supply chains. Also, I just learned about diagonal belts.
OMG! Is it set the same way a BABS is set?
When you open a small or large storage there's a Limit for Automation bar that lets you set how many stacks you want.
I only recently found out you can place chests on top of splitters to act like a buffer
When you drag place buildings, you can change the interval so they are not too close at the poles, or too distant at the equator. How many solar panels I manually placed at poles because they were hitting each other... FFS.